Leo awoke to the gentle chirping of birds and the scent of freshly cut grass, which was immediately suspicious because his apartment had neither birds nor grass, fresh or otherwise. The closest thing to nature in his living space was Gerald the fern, and Gerald had been more brown than green for the better part of six months.
He blinked, his eyes adjusting to soft morning light that streamed through what appeared to be actual windows with actual glass, rather than the plastic-covered hole in the wall that had served as his apartment's primary source of natural illumination.
The bed beneath him was not his familiar mattress-on-the-floor arrangement, but an actual four-poster bed with curtains and everything.
"Am I dead?" he wondered aloud, his voice echoing strangely in what appeared to be a spacious, well-appointed room. "Is this the afterlife? Did my one semi-successful novel grant me access to the VIP section of heaven?"
A translucent blue screen flickered into existence before his eyes, hovering in the air like a holographic display from a science fiction movie. The text that appeared was written in a cheerful, sans-serif font that somehow managed to convey both helpfulness and barely contained sarcasm.
----
[System Initializing...]
[Welcome, User, to the world of Aethelgard.]
[We regret to inform you that you are, in fact, dead.]
[On the bright side, you're also in a fantasy world. So, you know, swings and roundabouts.]
---
Leo stared at the screen, his mind struggling to process what he was seeing. He had written systems like this into his novels dozens of times. It was a tired, overused trope borrowed from video games and light novels. The kind of lazy world-building shortcut that he had always criticized other authors for using.
And now it was happening to him.
----
[New Quest Issued: Don't Die Immediately]
• Description: Try not to die in a hilariously ironic way. Again. Your author would be so disappointed. Oh, wait. That's you.
• Reward: Continued existence and the opportunity to experience existential dread in a fantasy setting.
• Failure Penalty: A slightly less comfortable bed in the afterlife, and we'll have to explain to the cosmic bureaucracy why you died twice in one day.
----
"This can't be happening," Leo whispered, his voice barely audible. The screen remained stubbornly present, its cheerful blue glow casting strange shadows across the unfamiliar room.
He sat up slowly, his heart pounding with a rhythm that seemed far too energetic for someone who was supposedly dead. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see the familiar calluses from years of typing and the ink stains that had become permanent fixtures on his fingers.
These were not his hands.
They were younger, smoother, and inexplicably calloused in different places, the kind of calluses that came from sword work rather than keyboard work. The skin was pale but healthy, unmarked by the stress-induced eczema that had plagued him during his final months of literary struggle.
Panic rising in his throat, Leo scrambled out of the impossibly comfortable bed and rushed to a nearby mirror.
The face that stared back at him was not his own. Gone was the prematurely aged visage of a twenty-eight-year-old man who looked forty, complete with stress lines, dark circles under his eyes, and the general appearance of someone who had given up on life sometime around his twenty-fifth birthday.
Instead, he saw the face of a young man in his late teens, with a mop of unruly brown hair and a perpetually unimpressed expression that somehow managed to convey both intelligence and profound skepticism.
The face was handsome in an unremarkable way the kind of generic attractiveness that would allow someone to blend into a crowd without drawing attention.
He was, in a word, average. Aggressively, determinedly average.
He was also a character from his own novel.
The realization hit him like a physical blow. He was an unnamed student at the Royal Academy of Aethelgard, one of the background characters he had created to populate his fictional world.
A redshirt.
A nobody.
A character so insignificant that he hadn't even bothered to give him a name, referring to him in his notes simply as "Student #47" or "Generic Academy Background Character #3."
More importantly, he was a character destined to die in chapter three, crushed by a runaway training golem during a demonstration that was supposed to showcase the academy's new and improved magical constructs.
Leo stared at his reflection, and slowly, a smile began to spread across his unfamiliar face. It was not a smile of joy or excitement, but rather the smile of a man who had just realized that he had been dealt the best possible hand in the worst possible situation.
He wasn't the hero. He wasn't the villain. He wasn't even a named supporting character with plot armor and narrative importance.
He was a nobody.
"Thank God," he said, a genuine, heartfelt sigh of relief escaping his lips. "I'm not the protagonist."
The implications were staggering. As an unnamed background character, he had no destiny to fulfill, no prophecy to complete, no dark lord to defeat.
All he had to do was avoid the main plot entirely, and he could live a long, comfortable, and utterly boring life in this new world. He could find a nice, quiet corner of the kingdom, open a bookstore, and spend his days reading other people's badly written fantasy novels for a change.
It was the perfect plan. A plan so simple and foolproof that even he couldn't mess it up.
---
[New Quest Issued: Survive the Tutorial]
• Description: Learn the basics of not dying in a fantasy world. This includes but is not limited to: avoiding obvious death flags, not touching mysterious glowing objects, and remembering that the red potions are usually healing potions, not strawberry flavoring.
• Reward: Basic survival skills and a complimentary "I Survived My First Day in a Fantasy World" achievement.
• Failure Penalty: Becoming a cautionary tale for future reincarnated individuals.
---
Leo looked at the quest notification and nodded approvingly. It seemed reasonable enough. He had, after all, written this world. He knew where all the dangerous areas were, which characters to avoid, and most importantly, he knew exactly when and where Student #47 was supposed to die.
All he had to do was not be there when it happened.
It was, he reflected, the most achievable goal he had set for himself in years.
The plan would last for approximately five minutes.